There may be a time and a place for everything. The difficulty is figuring out when and where.

This Just In: Not Only Am I a Franzen Apologist, I Am a Zizek Apologist

I’m sure lots of you, if not all of you, have seen this take-down of Slavoj Zizek for being a Giant Jerk Who Says Rude/Insensitive/Terrible Things About and To Students. I’m not going to write a big, long post about this, but I just want to put it out there that I find Zizek a delight. I thoroughly enjoy reading his stuff, I enjoy teaching his stuff in my critical theory course and find it incredibly useful to teach him, and I have seen him speak and it was probably the most memorable, educational, and enjoyable academic talk I’ve ever attended.

I certainly don’t think the Crisis in the Humanities is the fault of Slavoj Zizek, a dude that mostpeople castigating him don’t seem to know much about. They don’t seem to have a familiarity with his work or to have even known existed before this brouhaha (check out the comment thread of the piece to which I linked).

I find Zizek useful for my scholarship, in spite of his flaws. Kind of like how I love D.H. Lawrence’s novels in spite of the fact that he has some peculiar ideas (to say the least) about sex and women, or how I appreciate Ezra Pound’s poetry even though he was a fascist. Does the fact that I can find value in the work of these yahoos provide an excuse for the horrible things they have thought or said? Nope, not at all. But I am comfortable with being critical of the person while at the same time acknowledging the value of their intellectual and/or artistic contribution to culture. I don’t look to theorists or authors or celebrities or artists or whatever to be “good role models.” I mean, seriously. That’s awfully reductive, no? Anti-intellectual, even? This reminds me of a colleague of mine who said T.S. Eliot should not be taught in any college classroom because he objects to Eliot’s politics. I feel like those sorts of assertions have more to do with the Crisis in the Humanities than any blustery bullshit that Zizek spouts.

In other news, I am back to my book project with a vengeance and it turns out that writing comes easily when you buckle down to actually do some writing. I should have two chapters revised and my book proposal done before I go to Italy, and I should be able to get the whole manuscript ready (should somebody want to see the whole thing) by September 1. Yes, this is ambitious, but I need to be fucking done with this idea.

Now time to clean up around the house and get ready for Talking about Ideas and Drinking Wine with CC later.

Yeah, that’s what I think, too. And I think the Zizek angle basically click-bait. But I’ve seen SO MUCH about this, with lots of people taking her piece at face value that Zizek Is the Devil that I wanted to say something about it.

I think this is also a matter of cultural difference between Anglo-Saxon and central European university systems. I’m from a similar place as Zizek and in our university tradition students are treated as independent adults, which means that they are expected to keep professional distance to teachers (and indeed they do, it would never ever occur to any student there to go tell personal stuff to teachers like in the article). On the other hand, I’m now in UK and here (and from what I hear from my US colleagues and what I read in the blogoshpere even more so in US), the tradition seems to be to take care of students on a much more personal level, something that would be equivalent to high-schools in my original country, but not universities. So in my view, what Zizek apparently said, while phrased rather unfortunately, simply just relfects this cultural difference in how students are seen: as adults vs. as extended-high-school-kids.

Worth noting: coming from a working-class background, and eastern European ethnic origins, in the US? Zizek seems like one of my people. I only criticize what he said because I was socialized to think it was wrong. But on my own? Yeah, I get the joke.

It’s Schuman, not Schulman, but again, I don’t know why I get surprised at the cynicism of the comments on this here blog. In the end, they just exemplify better than anything else the pervasive sado masochistic attitude so typical in academia.

I had sort of hoped that Dr. Crazy would show a bit more compassion this time, seeing that she normally cares for her students. But I guess a big name is a big name, damn all those students that knew no better than to expect respectful treatment from their professors.

Also “I get the joke but I was socialised to think it was wrong”? How much of a hypocrite can one get? I will remember it the next time a bloke says “that misogynistic comment? Super funny, but I can’t say so in public…”

Lawyers, Guns, and Money has had a few posts on this earlier in the week that note that this is Schuman’s schtick, which is rejecting membership in a club that hasn’t invited her to join, plus clickbait.

To “A Reader” – Part of me feels like I shouldn’t respond because why invite trouble. But the reason that I continue this blog is because I value dialogue, so here it goes.

Here’s the thing. Let me direct you to my point that I made in bold: “Does the fact that I can find value in the work of these yahoos provide an excuse for the horrible things they have thought or said? Nope, not at all.” And as for my comment about “getting the joke” – don’t we all sometimes “get the joke” even when we know better? And yes, that goes for the misogynistic joke (or the racist joke, or the anti-semitic joke, or the homophobic joke, or the [insert whatever] joke), too. My point wasn’t that it was a *good* joke, or even a defensible one. Just that because of my background, I get it. And sure, that might make me a horrible person. I’ll own that. But I also think that people who are piling on Zizek because of his accent, because he spits when he talks (and he does do that, a lot, and yes, I’m a horrible person because I’ve made fun of that, too), because he looks like he needs a shower, are probably horrible people, too. Those comments are no less reprehensible than Zizek’s.

For what it’s worth: it’s not that I’m giving him a pass because he’s a celebrity, or at least not exactly. I do think that the role that he plays (just like the role that Judith Butler plays, or the role that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. plays) in the profession and in the classroom is different from the role that I play at a regional state university. And I will stand by what was the point of this post, which is that Slavoj Zizek is NOT the guy who is hurting the humanities in public discourse. He said a bunch of shitty things. He might be a totally shitty human being, but I can’t quite say that because I don’t actually know him. But at the end of the day, if the humanities are in trouble, I don’t think that it’s because Slavoj Zizek doesn’t want to grade papers or counsel students who are in trouble. The problems in the humanities are more complicated than that, and they are more insidious than that. And yeah, as a person who finds his intellectual work useful to her own intellectual work, I wanted to defend him – not because he did anything right in this instance (he didn’t), but because I want a better conversation than this one, one that actually addresses the problems that we all do have.

In sum: I care a ton about students. I don’t lack compassion. I just don’t think that Zizek (or even people who totally love him) are in any way the majority of people in the humanities, or even in English Studies. Thus? Singling him out as some sort of saboteur to the mission of the humanities is profoundly dumb.

No need to fear trouble, Dr. Crazy, I wasn’t looking for any. I get your point and your arguments, which are well articulated in your response. I understand the distance between an intellectual as a person with their flaws, and their scholarship. I also know that Zizek is not the reason why the humanities and academia in general are going through trouble — he is more than anything a symptom of it. I of course respect your defending him. But I just don’t get the dismissive comments towards the author of the piece, who might have written a naive black-or-white column but has not done anything wrong pointing out Zizek’s less than excusable behaviour. Singling him out might habe been indeed dumb but calling him on his jerkiness is not, IMHO.

How much do you really know about Žižek? I can’t believe how this ‘ok-not-a-jerk’ is fooling people abroad. He is no dissident and no victim of the former communist regime in his home country, as he sometimes is trying to show himself. On the contrary, he and his political friends from ex party nomenclature (for whom he would “put his arm on the fire, if needed”) and their strong propaganda machine are very much promoting the nostalgic sense of former regime and of course, encouraging the overall anti-US and anti-Western propaganda here in Slovenia (in the heart of Europe). Look at this link: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_04_18/9-countries-that-hates-US-most-4355/.

And, Jesus holly mother, he is even the director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Oh, yes, he is preaching about human rights and humanity when abroad, but when at home his ‘humanity’ is vanished, especially when the crimes of the former communist regime are in question. Ask his political friends how you can sweep away the recently discovered killings of hundreds of people, which were buried alive in a mine shaft by the former regime after the II. WWW. No words from Zizek.